Archive for Immigrant/Visitor Perpetrator

15th September 2016

Melinda Korosi (33) was murdered on 15th September 2016 at her home in Orton Road, Carlisle. She was beaten to death with a sharpened rock.

Ms Korosi was an English language teacher. She had two children and was a Hungarian national.

In March 2017, at Carlisle Crown Court, Miklos Verebes (29), Ms Korosi’s former partner and the father of her children, was found guilty of murder and three counts of rape between 2013 and 2016. He was sentenced to life in prison and ordered to serve a minimum of 28 years before he could be considered for parole.

Jurors watched a video of a police interview that Ms Korosi gave six days before her death in which she outlined regular sexual, physical and emotional abuse that she suffered at the hands of Verebes. Verebes had previously been jailed for an assault on Ms Korosi. He was also a Hungarian national.

Verebes murdered his Ms Korosi just two days after he was released without charge after she had reported to police that he had repeatedly raped her.

The Court heard Ms Korosi had already been classed as at high risk of harm following an assessment by an independent domestic violence adviser.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is investigating the contact that Ms Korosi had with Cumbria Constabulary.

Two Cumbria detectives are facing a misconduct inquiry.

An IPCC spokeswoman said: “Based on the evidence collected so far the IPCC investigator has decided there is an indication of misconduct by a detective constable and a detective sergeant at the force. Both officers have been notified. All other officers involved in this case are being treated as witnesses at this time.”

Following Verebes’s convictions, Ms Korosi’s mother Marta Hegyi Csiscman said she loved her daughter with her “whole heart”. She said: “It is very difficult to accept that she is no more, I can never embrace her again and I cannot help her achieve her goals. There are many questions and I don’t know if there will ever be answers to them, I only know that my big daughter of whom I was always proud did not deserve this and she will never be able to tell me what had happened and why. She can never make her dreams come true and cannot raise her children and I can never help her in anything anymore.”

Died 26th October 2016

Tahmina Khayer (17), a college student, died by suicide on October 26 2016 on the railway tracks at East Worthing Station.

Tahmina lived in Ham Road, Worthing, West Sussex.

The inquest, held on 22nd May 2017, at Crawley Coroner’s Court , heard that Tahmina had suffered abuse by her brother, Mahfouz. West Sussex senior coroner Penelope Schofield recorded a verdict of suicide and concluded Tahmina appeared to feel “she had no way out other than to take her own life”.

The coroner said: “I don’t think anyone here can think of this as anything other than a tragedy.
It was clear she was suffering abuse from her brother Mahfouz, who was clearly mentally ill.”

The Coroner said “Failings in the system caused unnecessary delays to getting her help.” She added “Tahmina was crying out for help for a very long period of time and it will never be known whether an earlier intervention would have stopped her death.”

The Coroner commented “Tahmina appears to always have put others before herself as in the note she left behind, she asked for some of her own savings to be given to charity.” She expressed her condolences to the family.

The inquest heard that Ms Khayer’s brother had had a diagnosis of schizophrenia and Sussex Police had attended the family’s home on a number of occasions to deal with reports of disturbances.

PC Billy Burstow, of the British Transport Police, read a statement to the court from Tahmina’s sister Tashlima Khayer, in which she said: “My sister loved to be creative and draw all day or go skateboarding and spend time with her friends. She wasn’t given help and support and this was a lot of responsibility for her, being so young.”

by Jean Calder

Twenty two people died in Manchester and 120 were injured when suicide bomber Salman Abedi blew himself up at an Arianna Grande concert packed with children and young people. Given that the former teenage actor is an idol of young teenage girls, it is likely that the bomber understood very well that most of the victims would be very young and female.

It may be that, as some commentators have said, that the bomber simply didn’t care that the victims were children, but went for soft targets at an event with little security. Or that he deliberately aimed to attack children, knowing the distress and terror this would create. Few have acknowledged the probability that this was a deliberate attack on girls.

Journalists and politicians who had no difficulty describing the 2016 Orlando attack as an assault on LGBT people, struggle to identify the Manchester bombing as a targeted hate crime, aimed not at ‘children’ but at girls. Yet this attack is entirely consistent with previous evidence of targeted attack against females. In 2004, young islamists were recorded by British police while discussing a possible attack on a London nightclub. The men commented that no one could “turn round and say ‘Oh, they were innocent’, those slags dancing around”. The journalist James Harkin has pointed out that In 2007, a car bomb outside Tiger Tiger nightclub in London’s Piccadilly “seems to have been designed to coincide with a ‘ladies’ night’ at the venue, in which the perpetrators might have hoped to kill and maim scantily clad young women drinking alcohol.”

ISIS, the extremist Islamist organisation that has claimed responsibility for the Manchester attack, has many similarities to other Jihadi groups such as the Taliban, Al Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra (now Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) and Boko Haram. Their adherents are islamist Sunni Muslims, influenced by Salafism, a sectarian system of thought rooted in Saudi Wahhabism. Funded by the Saudi government this ideology is now deeply embedded in British mosques and has taken root in universities, museums, libraries and schools. At its heart is the forced subordination of women and girls.

The Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, like Boko Haram in Nigeria, regularly attack girls, often in their schools, subjecting them to fire bombs, rape, kidnap and murder. The most famous victim of this sort of attack was Malala Yousafzai, who was shot on a school bus in Pakistan because she campaigned for girls’ education.

Malala rejected the highly confined role conservative sharia law permits to women and in so doing asserted her right to freedom and self-determination. She was supported in her free choice by her loving parents – as were the teenage girls attending the Arianna Grande concert – but to Salafist jihadis this would make no difference.

While young men like Abedi treat the women of their own Muslim communities with contempt, they reserve their deepest loathing for rebellious women and those in particular who are ‘apostate’ or non-muslim. They view them, as the journalist Sarah Vine puts it, as “barely human, the lowest of the low, for whom no punishment or suffering can ever be enough.” She says “We see this in the treatment of young Nigerian schoolgirls captured by Boko Haram and sold into sexual slavery; we see this in the mass rape of Yazidi women by Islamic State guerrillas; we’ve even seen it in our own country, in the systematic sexual abuse of young girls in Rochdale by so-called ‘moderate’ Muslim men who wrap their own daughters in the hijab, while simultaneously defiling other parents’ children”.

Politicians have for decades sacrificed young Muslim girls on the altar of multiculturalism, allowing powerful community leaders and domestic tyrants to deny girls equal rights to inheritance, freedom and even control of their own fertility. They have allowed generations of boys to grow up believing that they have a right to control female lives and domestic labour – whether this takes the form of untrammelled sexual access to obedient wives and control of their children or the sexual abuse of White girls from Rochdale, Christian schoolgirls from Nigeria or Yazidis from Sinjar.

A young unveiled Muslim woman on Question Time (25th May 2017) spoke out against Wahhabism in British mosques, calling for Saudi funding to be stopped. This brave young woman was supported by panelist Nazir Afzal, the former Crown Prosecutor of the North East of England who had a key role in ensuring that the organised abuse of white working class girls by groups of Pakistani-origin men, was eventually prosecuted.

These brave Muslims, like the Amadiyha Muslim women who stood on Westminster Bridge in protest against the murderous violence of Khalid Masood, deserve our respect, support and gratitude.

Died July 2016

Samia Shahid (28), a British woman from Bradford, was killed in July 2016 in northern Punjab, Pakistan, in a so-called honour killing. She was reportedly strangled with a scarf.

Ms Shahid’s former husband Chaudhry Muhammad Shakeel has admitted to her murder. Her father Chaudhry Mohammad Shahid has been held as an accessory.

Ms Shahid worked as a beautician. She had filed for divorce and married her second husband Syed Mukhtar Kazam in the UK. Her first marriage was arranged, the second, in 2014, was her own choice.

Ms Shahid’s relatives initially claimed she died of a heart attack, but her husband always believed she had been murdered. He campaigned for the case to be investigated and was supported by Naz Shah, the local MP in Bradford. Ms Shah said he had had to be placed under 24-hour police protection after receiving death threats.

In his confession, Ms Shahid’s former husband, who is also her cousin, reportedly said he had demanded she leave her second husband and remarry him, but she refused to do so.

It has been reported that Mr Kazam belongs to the Shia branch of Islam and that Ms Shahid had joined it and this may have been another reason why some members of her Sunni family strongly disapproved.

Abubakar Khuda Bakhsh, the investigating officer in the case, said “Once, facts are established, we would be in a better position to say if it is an honour killing or a murder as revenge.” It seems that claiming this as an “honour killing” rather than a revenge killing would be seen as a defence in Pakistan.

Ms Shahid’s death came days after the high-profile so-called honour killing of social media star Qandeel Baloch, whose brother has been arrested. Ms Baloch’s death led the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, to announce that the government would pass long-delayed legislation outlawing so-called honour killing. The new law is still pending.

Every year in Pakistan, more than 1000 women are reported to have been killed in so-called honour killings – almost always by father’s, husbands and brothers. The actual figures are likely to be much higher.

Note: This report was drawn from reports in the BBC, the Daily Mirror and the Guardian

Died 4th April 2014

Eleanor de Freitas (22) died by suicide on 4th April 2014. She was a trainee accountant who suffered from bipolar disorder.

De Freitas reported an alleged rape to the police in January 2013, a few days after the alleged incident in which she said she had been drugged then raped. The police investigated the incident, interviewing her and the alleged perpetrator, before telling her that they could not proceed further as there was not a realistic chance of a successful conviction. Her father, David de Freitas said she accepted the decision and tried to get on with her own life.

However, the accused man, pursued a private prosecution for perverting the course of justice. He accused her of making a false allegation of rape. Some months later the Crown Prosecution Service took over the case, against the advice of the police. The trial against Ms De Freitas was due to open on 7th April 2014. On 4th April 2014 she killed herself. She suffered from bi-polar disorder and had previously been sectioned.

The specialist sex-crime officers who investigated the rape complaint made by Eleanor de Freitas, consistently refused to support prosecutors in the case against her for allegedly making up the allegations. They were supported by their senior officer, but overruled by Martin Hewitt, an assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan police after lawyers from the Crown Prosecution Service held a meeting with him.

In a letter, DI Julian King, of Sapphire, the sexual offences investigation unit, said: “I stand by my decision in that I do not believe that Eleanor should ever have been prosecuted for PCJ [perverting the course of justice].”

At the inquest in March 2015, Eleanor de Freitas’ family criticised the Crown Prosecution Service for taking over the private prosecution started by the man she had accused of attacking her. Ms de Freitas’s father, David, told West London coroner’s court that his daughter was embarrassed about evidence that could emerge at her trial “to do with escort services and tantric massage services”.

It emerged after her death that Ms de Freitas had advertised herself on a website offering “tantric massages”, with pictures of her in underwear.

Chinyere Inyama, senior coroner for West London, recorded a verdict of suicide and said the upcoming trial was a “significant stressor”.

Victim Support, Justice for Women and the charity Inquest previously raised concerns about the decision to prosecute De Freitas.

Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, vigorously defended the decision to prosecute, saying it was a unique and tragic case.

The man who brought the case against her, whom she had previously accused of rape, was her former lover, Alexander Economou, the son of a Greek shipping magnate.

Note: This report was drawn from reports in the Guardian and the Times.

Died 12th September 2014

Mary Shipstone (7) was shot by her father on 11th September 2014 outside her home in Spring Hill, Northiam, East Sussex. Mary was flown to King’s College hospital in London where she died of her injuries shortly before 3pm the next day.

Lyndsey Shipstone (42) Mary’s mother, had left her father Yasser Alromisse (46) due to his violence. She had been living with her at a secret address in Northiam, near Rye, in East Sussex.

Alromisse, who lived in Worthing, West Sussex, was found shot dead in his car shortly after the killing.

Neighbours said Alromisse was waiting in his car for his daughter and ex-partner as they walked home from nearby Beckley Church of England primary school at 4pm. Ms Shipstone screamed: “He’s got a gun” before Alromisse shot Mary twice in the head.

Armed police arrived at the scene within minutes and found Alromisse slumped inside his car with a self-inflicted bullet wound.

In a statement issued through Sussex Police, Ms Shipstone and her son Stephen said: “We are grieving the death of our beautiful and loving Mary.”

Beckley Primary School, where Mary was a pupil, said in a statement “This is a dreadfully sad and shocking incident and the whole school community are praying for her and her family.”

After the shooting, a neighbour, Denise Berwick said “All I heard was a lady shouting and then I looked out and she was cradling her child in her arms. I have never seen anything like that before. It’s an absolute tragedy and my heart goes out to the girl and her family.”

The incident raises questions for Sussex police, whose officers had been in contact with Ms Shipstone in the weeks and months leading up to the killing. Ms Shipstone is understood to have told police she was concerned about a possible attack by her ex-partner, who officers knew had a history of domestic violence.

In 2013, Ms Shipstone was moved to a secret address in the quiet village with Mary and her older son, Stephen Shipstone (21) to escape Alromisse. He was involved in a custody battle for the children and was known to pose a threat to the family due to his history of domestic violence.

Egyptian-born Alromisse is thought to have discovered their address months before the shooting due to details on court papers. He was reportedly seen a week earlier staking out the area in his Toyota Rav 4 vehicle.

Ms Shipstone married Alromisse in Liverpool in 2005 after she converted to Islam. After they separated, Ms Shipstone lived with her children in Brighton between 2009 and 2011.

Investigators are waiting to take a full account from Ms Shipstone. The case is likely to face investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The Guardian reported that as at 15th September 2014 the IPCC had not yet received a referral from Sussex police.

The force declined to comment on any warnings it may have received about Alromisse. A spokesman said: “We’re investigating the circumstances of how Alromisse came to be at the house in Northiam. At this stage, we are still trying to confirm how he discovered the address.”

Police and Crime Commissioner, Katy Bourne, said: “The untimely and tragic death of Mary Shipstone has no doubt had a profound effect on her family, the local community and everyone who knew her. In my role as PCC, I will be closely following the progress of the police investigation and the circumstances around Mary’s death.”

After the shooting, Detective Chief Inspector Jason Taylor said: “This is a fast-moving investigation and there are still a large amount of inquiries being carried out before we can confirm the full picture of what happened. We are currently trying to establish Mr Alromisse’s movements over the last few days and are keen to hear from anyone who may have seen or heard from him. At this time however, I am not looking for anyone else in connection with this investigation and believe this to be an isolated incident.”

Chief Superintendent Neil Honnor, divisional commander for Sussex Police in East Sussex, said: “This was a tragic domestic incident that has had the most terrible of outcomes for the family. We are working with partner agencies and local leaders to support and reassure the community who are understandably upset about what has happened.
We are trying to be as open and honest with the public as we can but have to take into account the traumatic experience the family is going through as well as the fact that this is an ongoing investigation. If anyone has any concerns about the safety of their neighbourhood I would urge them to contact us but we are sure this was an isolated incident and that no one else is in any danger.”